Britain still has world-class schools and universities from which our children
can benefit

For all its travails, there is one area where the Coalition is unquestionably on the right path: education. This is fortunate, since it is also the area that will determine whether the Britain of the 21st century thrives or declines.

There is nothing new, of course, in the idea that education matters: think of Tony Blair’s famous incantation of the word in 1996, designed to persuade the middle classes that he shared their burning desire to better their children’s lot. Think, too, of the reaction to Michael Gove’s recent letter to the Radio Times. In it, the Education Secretary apologised to Daniel Montgomery for his “clever-dick questions” and “pathetic showing-off” as a pupil at Robert Gordon’s College in Aberdeen. It struck a chord, with several other public figures taking the chance to apologise to, or simply thank, those teachers who had made a difference in their lives.

As Mr Gove observed this week in a speech to the think tank Politeia, all the evidence from Britain and around the world shows that “the quality of teaching – and the prestige of the teaching profession – is the single most important factor in driving up educational standards”. And in lowering them: as Mr Gove’s colleague, David Laws, lamented to this newspaper, too many educators are happy to prod children along the road to mediocrity instead of encouraging them to reach for the stars. Just as good teachers broaden their pupils’ horizons, bad ones constrict them: take the case of Fiona Phillips, the GMTV presenter, who, on a visit to Millbrook School in Southampton this week, launched into a tirade against the way that it had crushed her childhood aspirations.

The Government is doing its best to improve the situation. Alongside the rest of his education reforms – intended to expand choice, strip away bureaucracy, and give teachers freedom to innovate – Mr Gove wants to improve the profession’s status drastically. He is toughening up the requirements to enter teacher training; drastically expanding the TeachFirst initiative, which has already attracted thousands of high-quality graduates; and bringing in a host of other measures to lure the best people into the profession, even if it means bypassing the hidebound, Leftist silos of the teacher-training regime.

What has not been appreciated, however, is the scale of the stakes. Our news story today about the surging demand for places at grammar schools – as familiar a tale as the clamour for places at Oxbridge, or soaring property values within the best schools’ catchment areas – shows that even amid economic misery, parents are as desperate as ever to invest in their children’s education, in the knowledge that it is the best way to equip them for the future. And Britain still has world-class institutions from which those children can benefit: witness the flood of foreign pupils seeking entrance to our elite schools and universities.

Yet this desire for a better future is not unique to Britain. Across the nations of the East, entire families are sacrificing everything, working feverishly, denying themselves the most basic luxuries, in order to scrape together the funds to educate their children. Those children, in turn, are expected to devote themselves to building a more prosperous existence for themselves and their relatives (there is little talk, in New Delhi or Guangzhou, of “work-life balance”).

Britain, of course, has long turned away from such hot-housing. We accept that not every child is a potential Oxford or Cambridge scholar (although we could do far more to cater for those that are not, by improving vocational education). But until the arrival of Mr Gove, government had failed to grasp what every parent knows instinctively – that our best hope for the future lies in educating every child to the limits of its ability. In the coming decades, nations will compete not on the battlefield, but in the classroom, striving to claim – through talent, innovation and entrepreneurship – the fruits of globalisation. The merest glance at the international rankings shows that we are starting to lag dangerously in this intellectual arms race. That needs to change, and urgently. For as Michael Gove knows, great teachers and great schools are not just a priceless boon to their pupils – they are this country’s most vital resource.